Editor’s Note: Karl Grossman, a professor of journalism at SUNY Westbury, is an old friend and comrade de plume. I trust his perspective on this issue. He is not what you would call an alarmist, just someone with good common sense and a lot of knowledge about nuclear issues, particularly involving NASA. He was involved in making sure the Cassini Space Probe was flown past the Earth in 1999 at a slightly less dangerous distance. –efc
What Japan is now trying to avoid is a complete loss of power to the cooling systems at its Fukushima nuclear power plant. This would lead to a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident — a disaster which could have catastrophic impacts on Japan and much of the world.
Radioactive material is used in a nuclear plant as a heat source — to boil water and produce steam that turns a turbine that generates electricity. Huge amounts of radioactive material are made to go through a chain reaction, a process in which atomic particles bombard the nuclei of atoms, causing them to break up and generate heat.
But to keep the nuclear reaction in check — to prevent the material from overheating — vast amounts of coolant are required — up to a million gallons of water a minute in the most common nuclear plants that have been built (“light water” reactors). That is why nuclear plants are sited along rivers and bays, to use the water as coolant.
If the water which cools the reactor “core” — its 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of radioactive fuel load — stops flowing, the “emergency core cooling system” must send water in. If it fails, a loss-of-coolant or meltdown accident can occur.
In such an accident, the core of nuclear fuel, which in less than a minute can reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, burns through the cement bottom of the nuclear plant and bores into the earth. This is what U.S. nuclear scientists have dubbed the “China syndrome” — based on a nuclear plant on their side of the planet undergoing an accident seemingly sending its white-hot core in the direction of China.